I Couldn't Agree More

The need to describe things as they are:

Aware that the use of carefully tested, innocuous sounding euphemisms is the cornerstone of the corporate and military “perception management” campaigns, I have made a great effort to be stark and simple in my descriptions. When people anywhere get killed by others, I call it murder. When countries that have done nothing to us get invaded I call it wanton aggression and compare it to other times in recent history when countries suffered the unprovoked losses of sovereignty. I refer to people as “war criminals” who have gone on TV and admitted planning and carrying out, well, war crimes.

The hope, of course, is to encourage people to transcend the normalizing rhetoric craftily employed by the powers that be and begin use their empathetic imaginations, to ask what it would be like to be the person sent away forever with no charges, to watch your country destroyed for having done absolutely nothing to the country of the invaders, to be beaten by cops for no reason other than you wish to exercise the most basic of democratic rights, to live in a place where the wealthy own not only the corporations you work in, but most of the venues where you might want to express yourself freely as an individual. In other words, the goal is to have people contemplate and in some sense feel the reality and magnitude of what being done in their name.